Some Reactive Strategies; Shout Clusters

One of the key ingredients to success is being able to adapt to changing circumstances. Every manager does it in real life, you have to do it in your game. The addition of the Tactics Creator made changing things around far more intuitive. More often than not, I would have a friend ask me on Facebook or in class (yes, we played FM in uni…) to help them out with their tactics during a game. They often had a pretty good idea of what they wanted their team to do, but they failed to translate this idea into slider terminology, which meant their tactical mindset backfired because they weren’t able to adjust the sliders and boxes properly to suit the ideas they had in their head.

With the help of the touchline shouts, this is all behind us. These shouts create a more intuitive style of play, which enables you to just shout the same things a real football manager would shout during a match. “Retain possession” or “Get it forward” are simple instructions, yet when you use these clear commands, you have to adjust several sliders to achieve the desired effect.

Whilst a single shout can influence several sliders and/or boxes, I had noticed that the now deceased FMLive game took these shouts a step further, combining multiple shouts into a single command. I’ve always used these same clusters myself, manually creating them. I would like to share these commands and the shouts they entail with you, so you could use them for yourselves. Unfortunately, there are not hotkeys for these clusters, so you would have to manually click the various shouts to reach the desired effect, but it still beats moving a lot of sliders around or having 15 versions of the same tactic all saved onto your hard drive.

BALL OVER THE TOP
– Exploit the middle
– Play narrower
– Push higher up
– Pump ball into box
– Shoot on sight

GET ROUND THE BACK
– Play wider
– Drop deeper
– Exploit the flanks
– Get ball forward
– Pass into space
– Work ball into box

If you want to manually create a shout cluster, that’s a fairly simple process too. You start off by opening the tactics screen and checking out the various team instructions. If you have combined them into a cluster you wish to use, you have to look at the bottom right of this menu.

Under Presets, you can save this combination, which enables you to use all of these shouts combined with a single click during matches.